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Mixing for Web Series editing, but the result was well worth it. Justin Walker, supervising sound editor on the series, says, "I am proud to see it grow from a Web series to a television show." Burning Love is a spoof of reality shows like, The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette, where contestants compete for "love." Season 3, titled Burning Love: Burning Down the House, is a bit different. The "favorite" contestants from the first two seasons compete for a $900 cash prize instead of love. The show stars Michael Ian Black (from sketch comedy The State) as the host, and Ken Marino (also from The State) as Mark Orlando, the "bachelor" in Season 1. You can watch all the episodes in Season 3 for free on Yahoo! Screen. While Burning Love: Burning Down the House is a scripted series, there were many times when the actors and actresses improvised lines. One of Harbor Sound's mixing rooms. The studio is currently working on the Web series Alpha House. 36 "Takes were especially long, sometimes spanning over 15 minutes," reports Walker. "The crew would seldom cut to start a new take." This meant it took longer to find alt takes to fix dialog problems. With 10- or 15-minutelong takes, Walker explains, the haystack is much larger to find the needle in. On the upside, listening to alternate takes revealed many laugh-out-loud gems of audio. "You could tell that the crew was having a hard time not cracking up in the middle of a take." Miraglia used the Izotope RX plug-in to clean the dialog tracks. It's his go-to tool for noise reduction, de-clicking and distortion removal. "I love the advanced window of the Denoiser. You can really get in there and dial out the unwanted noise and frequencies. That whole suite of tools is amazing, and when you dial it in just right you really don't hear any processing artifacts." As with most reality shows, the music was wall to wall. Burning Love: Burning Down the House used production music provided by DL Music. There are music beds for the interview sections, as well as short cues to Post • July 2013 highlight the comedy or the psuedo-drama. Miraglia mixed the music with dynamics in mind, allowing room for dramatic swells when appropriate. In addition to making room for the big moments with the mix, the picture edit also allowed moments for the music, or effects, to take over. "The editors would intentionally create little pockets for us to mix up or sting out music to create the appropriate punctuation where needed." Miraglia also used Elastic Audio in Pro Tools to re-time the music tracks to hit the picture better in particular moments. From a sound effects standpoint, Burning Love: Burning Down the House is much different from other reality shows. Miraglia and Walker did a lot of work with the background ambience and sound design. Miraglia says, "Not many reality shows do backgrounds, but we made sure that the sound was fully filled out. We were elaborate with the sound effects work we did." Miraglia and Walker have worked on many projects in the past, and he mentions that Walker used to be his assistant, so he's very familiar with Miraglia's style of working. That relationship ended up being crucial when it came to finishing Burning Love: Burning Down the House on time. They were asked to complete the series a month early. Instead of mixing two episodes a week, Miraglia had to mix three episodes a week, plus juggle other projects he was working on. "We were on fire. It was a huge challenge but we managed to get them all out really quick. I'm really well organized and all my templates are laid out meticulously. Justin knows how to prep things for me since he was actually my assistant for the longest time. We know how to work really well together, and just staying organized helped." The show was mixed in 5.1 at Miraglia's studio in Hollywood, where he's currently mixing Finding Bigfoot for Animal Planet. When mixing for TV, Miraglia knows exactly where his levels need to be, but in mixing for the Web, it's a big challenge trying to find the right output level. Miraglia calls the Web the wild, wild west. "There are no standards. You never know if the ads that get played before and after your show will be louder or softer than the program. We did a lot of research on the levels of the videos out there, and what the ads were being mixed at. Everybody is all over the map." Miraglia points out another element to the www.postmagazine.com challenge of mixing for the Web. For Burning Love: Burning Down the House, the audio being played back on the Yahoo! Screen site has a lot of artifacts created from the encoding format they used. "That's crazy. Why can we watch YouTube videos and the audio sounds great, but when we watch a Web series on Yahoo! Screen, they use poor encoding that has super compressed audio and super compressed video. They're trying to create a place for Web series and support the whole new media movement, and to hear those artifacts in the final playback is disappointing. We spend a lot of time really refining those mixes." Miraglia believes there should be standards for the Web, just like there are standards for broadcast. After seeing the full HD version of Burning Love: Burning Down the House during playback at Paramount, Miraglia was surprised by how it looked online. "When they have it on the site in that small window, you can see compression artifacts. The picture wasn't as bad as the sound I thought, but, really, who is at the wheel? Who is doing the encoding? I really want to talk to them and say, 'Why are you doing it like this?' You have to know how to encode the media. The Web is the wild, wild west, across the board, and you never know what you're going to get until it airs. Then it's like, ok, well, that's how it turned out." Miraglia always checks his mixes on a variety of speakers, and in different formats. He listens in 5.1, stereo, and mono. He auditions the mix on Genelec studio monitors, cheap TV speakers, laptop speakers, Ultrasone headphones, and also less expensive Skull Candy earbuds. "I'm a big proponent of checking mixes because things can sound so different on different devices." ALPHA HOUSE Glenfield Payne is a supervising sound editor at Harbor Sound, the sound division of Harbor Picture Company (www.harborpicturecompany.com/sound) in New York City. Harbor Sound opened for business in April, just in time to mix the pilot episode of Alpha House for Amazon Originals. Amazon Originals made several Web series pilots available for free download. Based on audience feedback, they selected several pilots to become full Web series. More Alpha House episodes are in production, but no release date has been set. Alpha House follows four senators, including Gil John Biggs (John Goodman) and Senator Vernon Smits (Bill Murray), who continued on page 46